News and Events

IronGate is proud to confirm that we will be participating in InfoComm 2012 alongside Aten and BlackMagic Design, two vendor partners from the 2012 IronGate AV Standing Offer (as issued by the Government of Canada / PWGSC). You will find us in Las Vegas between June 12th-15th, 2012 - please stop by or request an appointment for a private meeting.

Information and registration details for the show are available at: http://www.infocommshow.org/

Having realized much personal and professional growth since joining the Ottawa Chapter of Entrepreneurs’ Organization, Sean Costello (founder and president of IronGate) is proud to announce that he was asked and has sine agreed to lead the communications and community outreach efforts for his local Chapter of EO through the organizations fiscal year 2013 (July 1st - June 30th). With great thanks to outgoing 2012 Communications Chair, Chuck Shabsove of Capital Appliance & BBQ for his efforts in the past year, Sean will be working with the rest of the incoming board to ensure a smooth transition.

For those of you that may not know about EO:The Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) is a global business network of 8,000+ business owners in 121 chapters and 40 countries. Founded in 1987 by a group of young entrepreneurs, EO enables small and large business owners to learn from each other, leading to greater business success and an enriched personal life. Our vision is to build the world’s most influential entrepreneur community, which aligns with our mission of supporting entrepreneurial education and engaging entrepreneurs to learn and grow.

This year, EO is celebrating its 25th Anniversary with events around the world, which will highlight the growth of our entrepreneur network and its role in the lives of members everywhere. As a global business owner network and association, we help transform the lives of the entrepreneurs who transform the world. We educate, we transform, we inspire and we offer invaluable resources in the form of events, leadership-development programs, an online entrepreneur forum, and business owner education opportunities, among other resources designed for business growth.

The Entrepreneurs’ Organization also operates the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards (GSEA), the premier award program for undergraduate students that own and run businesses while attending a college or university; and Accelerator, a series of quarterly, high-impact learning events designed to provide top business owners with the tools, knowledge and skills they need to grow their businesses to more than US$1 million in annual revenue.

Sean Costello has been confirmed as a presenter for multiple stops on the year-long, multi-city 2012 MacTech Boot Camp training schedule, including New York City and Minneapolis. With 19 years of experience as a consultant and business operator, Sean will bring his unique approach to learning, teaching, sharing and networking to each city he visits.

Please check in with the MacTech events page HERE and let us know where you’ll be joining us. We’re looking forward to a good time, and we encourage you to track us down and say “Hi!” along the way.

Ottawa, Canada (June 1, 2011) – IronGate Server Management and Consulting (IronGate) earned spot number 151 on the PROFIT 200 ranking of Fastest-Growing Companies in Canada. Revenues have grown an average of 298% over the past five years.

IronGate removes the stress and uncertainty that business leaders commonly have about the state of their data protection. It provides strong, enterprise-class data back-up systems using Code 42 Software’s CrashPlan PROe product offering to protect files on-site and remotely through secure Canadian data centres. IronGate offers 24-hour live phone support and on-site service to help organizations manage stored information.

IronGate attributes its growth over the years to progressively discovering new ways to solve classic business challenges. The service team acquires customer related business knowledge through pro-active consultative relationships with larger, broader-scope businesses and service providers. Sharing years of expertise and developed best practices has lead customers to their own success. IronGate would like to congratulate two of its’ customers recognized for their success on this year’s PROFIT 200.

The success of IronGate’s managed back-up service, Background Backup, has also been tremendous. After three years of development and growth under IronGate, Background Backup launched as its own entity in early 2011. Background Backup is a simple, powerful data protection solution for small or medium-sized business, generally sized between one and ninety-nine employees. Reliable, consistent and secure, the CrashPlan PRO powered solution backs up company files invisibly and automatically. Background Backup’s trustworthy capabilities contributed to IronGate’s consistent year over year revenue growth.

“IronGate’s first class service in establishing and maintaining our networks has enabled us to run our business smoothly,” said Suzan Acker, Marketing Services Director at Solera Marketing. “IronGate’s outstanding team has rescued us on more than one occasion and I can personally attest to the incredible value of their Background Backup service. It is critical for us, as any business, to have our systems up and running at all times and our files protected—IronGate’s unparallel customer service gives us peace of mind.”

“Sean, IronGate’s founder, is a dynamic thinker and an innovative force. He’s earned this distinction and we’re proud to have him in our community of entrepreneurs,” said Govindh Jayaraman, President-Elect of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization’s Ottawa chapter. “Our mission is to engage leading entrepreneurs to learn and grow, and Sean’s inclusion in the Profit 200 list is evidence of just how far our members go. Sean also contributes to our chapter by sharing his experiences, which in turn helps other member entrepreneurs to learn and grow as well.”

“We are proud to make the list as one of Canada’s most successful growth companies. The ranking is a testament to the dedication of our hard working team of professionals,” said Sean Costello, Founder of IronGate. ”We thank our loyal customers who recognize the need for their organizations to have a solid defense against data loss and have faith in IronGate to do the job,” added Costello.

Now in its 23rd year, the PROFIT 200 ranks Canada’s Fastest-Growing Companies by five-year revenue growth, the most reliable single indicator of business success. The list published in the June issue of PROFIT magazine and online at profitguide.com celebrates entrepreneurial achievement by some of Canada’s finest.

IronGate Server Management & Consulting is pleased to confirm a contingent of senior sales and technical staff from Code 42 Software, makers of the award-winning CrashPlan PROe enterprise-class backup software, will be joining us as we launch the Canadian “Steak & Potatoes, Latops & Backup” Lunch-n-Learn series, kicking off in Calgary, Alberta on Wed, June 8th, 2011. We will also be touching down in Toronto, Ontario on June 22nd, with additional dates and cities being confirmed in the near future.

CrashPlan PROe is an extremely efficient and secure multi-destination backup and disaster recovery solution, easily handling the needs of Fortune 500 and 1000 enterprise businesses worldwide, with tens of thousands of systems being protected at any given moment. Engineered to outperform classic tape-based backup systems at a fraction of the ongoing cost, CrashPlan PROe has been aggressively tested and ultimately selected for mass deployment within such recognizable organizations as Apple, Google, LinkedIn and Stanford University.

If you are responsible for the ongoing management and protection of more than 75 client or server nodes within your organization, running Linux, Windows, MacOS or even Sun Solaris, you owe it to yourself to join us in Toronto on June 22nd for our interactive presentation. You’ll find that we’ll satisfy both your mid-day appetite AND your need for a solid, scalable, multi-destination backup platform - handily protecting even your traveling laptops.

Remembering with pride our role as founding sponsors of the very first LightSpeed CertCamp, it is with great joy that we are poised and ready to attend the 10th such camp, which will be held in San Francisco, March 31 - April 2nd, 2011.

While attending, Sean will be announcing updates to the IronGate discounted service offering for LightSpeed Resellers, in addition to sharing exciting news from Background Backup Inc., the business-class, managed data protection service which has recently been spun off from IronGate after three years of development and preparation.

As a part of Apple Connect 2011 (a weeklong professional development training event, held in Markham, ON), Sean Costello of IronGate Server Management & Consulting will be co-hosting the Apple Consultants Network (ACN) Meet ‘n Mingle event on Wednesday, March 16th 2011.

The goal for the evening is to help introduce the 125 camp attendees, as well as the senior Apple Engineering and Sales teams, to the knowledge, expertise and capabilities of our active group of Canadian ACNs. In support of the event, a booklet was produced which includes brief bios and service examples, for each of the featured Apple-certified Consultants. Head on over to www.meettheconsultants.com to grab a PDF of the booklet, or to grab the vcards from all the hosts and presenters.

In conjunction with MacWorld week, Sean Costello and Chris Lafleur Bell are headed out on the road for a week of learning, teaching, sharing and networking.

Confirmed engagements include:
- A presentation on providing professional services remotely, at the MacTech Bootcamp 2011,
- A series of introductory and advanced CrashPlan PRO seminars at CreateMore, a San Francisco reseller of IronGate’s Background Backup managed backups, and
- A series of product and service seminars at Simply Computing, a Vancouver-based Background Backup reseller.

We’re looking forward to a good time, and encourage you to track us down and say “Hi!” along the way.

We are pleased to announce that our maintenance and upgrade window has been completed successfully, with a very clean and efficient execution. We were quite happy to see the data migration and internal synchronization tasks finish ahead of schedule, ultimately wrapping up early this morning.

After having closely monitored a number of test-client cutovers, and proceeding to execute a number of significant test restores (with data being brought back out of archives aged anywhere from days to years old), we issued a command for all clients to begin accessing the new servers at approx. 9:20 AM (EST). While all available clients connected almost immediately, the attached graph shows that it took approximately 3 hours for those clients to catch up and protect any files created during Christmas Eve and Christmas Day rolling shutdowns. By 1:00 PM, the vast majority of our customer base was right on track and up to snuff, and we have since been watching as others power on their machines, immediately connect and resume protection.

Thank you to everyone for being an ongoing part of our success, and for understanding the benefits of this scheduled expansion. We wish everybody a fantastic lead up to the New Year, and remind you that we are standing-by to assist if you have any questions or service concerns.

In order to accommodate the anticipated growth of Background Backup in 2011, the system administrators are going to be taking advantage of the low impact period between Christmas and New Years to migrate the master and slave servers onto larger, more robust versions of the Linux-based Background Backup appliances.

We wanted to communicate the details of the maintenance plan ahead of time, so that you can review it, ask questions about it, plan for it, and just generally be aware of things that are happening. The following points outline the planned maintenance activities, the timelines involved and the anticipated impact to service, by way of occasional shut-downs of the backup servers

Critical points about the planned work:
• The scheduled maintenance activities will only impact the offsite Background Backup servers, and will not affect the performance, use or readiness of any onsite backup destinations or appliances.

• In order to conduct the strongest possible maintenance validation and data integrity tests, no new users are permitted to be added to Background Backup on either the 24th, 25th or 26th of December, 2010.

• No changes whatsoever are being made to any of the Background Backup service urls and links, versions of software being used, or the features and settings available for use.

• Toll-free, 1:1 phone and email support will be available, in case any urgent situations arise at any time during the maintenance window. If you have questions about the planned maintenance, please email (using your registered email address) us at support@backgroundbackup.ca. Urgent requests can also be called in, to 1-800-BUNKER1.

Overview of planned work:
• Acquire and burn-in new servers and storage (this is already underway; servers have been onsite and running in a parallel test configuration since October).

• Prior to Dec 24th, copy (rsync) an initial set of encrypted backup archives to the new appliances, while all services remain live; there will be no interruption of service whatsoever during this phase, for all users and all destinations.

• Beginning at 6:00 PM (all times Eastern), December 24th, rolling “offsite destination” service outages will occur as groups of users (approx. 100 per group) have backups to their offsite destination stopped in order to perform clean, static synchronization of their up-to-the-minute archives. During this phase, users checking the CrashPlan application will continue to see a green icon to the left of the IronGate StrongBox destination in their CrashPlan application, however the status message to the right will eventually switch to “Destination unavailable”, as your group migrates.

• After all user archives have been cloned to the new appliances, we will bring down the existing master server, and bring up the new master server. This is likely to occur in the early afternoon of December 26th, but will occur earlier if the migration completes sooner than anticipated. During this phase the green icon beside the offsite destination will turn grey, but other appliance-based or local destinations will remain green and active.

• Once the performance of the new servers has been certified and verified to our satisfaction (likely less than 30 minutes), all client installations should auto-detect the new master server, and immediately begin secure communications. Within CrashPlan, users will see the destination status dot turn green.

• As the client agents auto-discover the new servers, a synchronization task will begin, ensuring that all client archive caches on each protected machine match the actual offsite archive.

• During this synchronization process, it may look like the client is re-uploading a significant amount of data; be assured that it is merely stepping through the files and performing a thorough analysis, and that any data previously uploaded should not require actual re-transmission.

• Through the morning of December 31st, users may experience one or more brief periods of offsite-destination service unavailability, as the final aspects to configuration and turn-up are performed, before the servers are released for service.